Given Up
by LarcSakurai
Summary: Cloud looks back on everything that happened... it was all his fault, wasn't it?


Pain. White hot, seering pain. Rippling through wired nerves and shocking him into insanity. His blood pounded in his ears and he screamed, he screamed louder and louder as the foreign substances ripped him apart inside out. His lungs burned of deprivation as the pain tore screeches of agony from deep inside his chest, tears and pain choking him into convulsions. It hurt so bad. Everything hurt, everything burned and screamed alongside him. It was eating him alive. He was gonna die, he was gonna die...

He barely heard the command of the scientists to restrain him as he broke free of the table restraints and slammed himself into the door, his nails clawing desperately at the door for freedom. Digging into the door he shredded the white paint, throwing himself into the obstruction repeatedly in an attempt to break free when the heavy handle refused to budge. They tried to grab his arms but he threw them into the wall, tearing at their faces drawing rivulets of blood from eyes and mouths and throats. His teeth sank into hands and slashed open fingers, tasting sweet mercury on his tongue. The entire world was a white blanket of electric pain.

Wild jolts tasered him into submission, heavy chains and straps buckling and seizing around his limbs to yank him back onto the table and tether him back into place. More needles came at him and he screamed. Some strange mechanism coming towards his face, a hot rush of air gagging him as they strapped it to his face, his erractic breath slowly beginning to even. He could feel the tightly coiled muscles throughout him begin to mellow out, exhaustion swallowing him into the dark blanket of sleep.

"He's a failure."

He was to blame. It was all his fault they made him their toy.

It didn't matter. He was imperfect.

Then there had been that other man. The other experiment that had helped him escape. They looked so much alike they were several times mistaken as brothers during their escapades. To Cloud's blonde spikes this man claimed black but both bore identical green eyes glowing with the testimony of undergoing the tortures of those deemed worthy enough to be SOLDIER material. His name was Zack and he bonded with the man fairly quickly, his arrogant and punky attitude complimenting Cloud's aloof tendency to brood.

Then there was the fire. Hatred's inferno that engulfed everything and anything in it's path devouring all he had known in one short night. It was all his fault. Everything was his fault. He'd crossed the treacherous winding paths through Mt. Nibel to the reactor where their lives had crash down around them. Where Tifa was hurt and Zack was badly injured and where the calamity of the skies reared her ugly head for the first time in centuries. It was all his fault. All Sephiroth's fault. The experiments, Zack's eventual demise, Nibelheim, his very existence. It was all his fault.

"This is all your fault!" he screamed into the darkness, watching the bleeding form of the one-winged angel slump to a knee. Here at the core of the planet deep within eternal darkness this would come to it's end. Sephiroth stared Cloud right in the eyes, a thin stream of blood running down his chin to drip down and dissolve into nothing. A low chuckle started in his throat, watching the other's blade, the blade of one of the many hundreds of lives he'd taken, rise up and poise to strike. Slowly he closed his eyes as he felt the blade pierce clean through his torso, blood gushing forth to spray over the blonde's hands. Weakly, he raised up his head and cast one more malicious smirk before disappearing to rejoin with the planet.

"That's right... it's all my fault..."

Staring out over the wasteland now, looking over what is left of Midgar's former 'glory' if one would label it that, Cloud's thoughts drifted back to that day. The minutes he'd spent within the eternal darkness were naught as in that realm time knew no meaning. A vacuum of nothingness and black. He slid his fingers over the broad handle of the buster sword long since rusted and worn by elements and deep in his mind he could still recall Sephiroth's vivid, identical green eyes to memory. Sephiroth had never been one to admit defeat. Never one to succumb to a warrior more powerful than he so willingly. As he stared into those eyes after the events that transpired even more recently with the three little remnants he couldn't shake the feeling this would be their last encounter. His eyes, though in voice he vowed to never be just a memory, spoke volumes only Cloud could understand. Only those that knew him back then, before the fire, before Jenova's corruption, could interpret. Eyes he himself had once bore.

The eyes of someone who'd finally given up.


End file.
